TWO GLEAMS OF LIGHr IN IRELAND.
ONE of them is Mr. Dillon's speech at Woodford. Most of our contemporaries are so irritated with the passion dis- played in that speech against the landlords, that they fail to recognise its impelling motive. It is an imploring speech, rather than a threatening one. Mr. Dillon wishes the agrarian struggle to continue, because he knows that if it ceases, the peasantry will regard Home-rule from a different point of view, and so far as personal interest goes—and it goes a long way with all the poorer races of Europe—will come to a different decision. He perceives that there is a readiness to purchase even under Lord Ashbourne's Act, which, though unobjec- tionable in principle, is not altogether tempting to tenants, and makes too little distinction among widely differing conditions. He adjures the peasantry, therefore, to pause, to insist on lower terms, to reduce rents now with a view to reducing the apparent capital value of the soil. They should, he said, with a contempt for the moral element in contract highly characteristic of modern Ireland, settle for themselves what would be a fair rent, offer the agents that, and if it is refused, place the money with persons in whom they can confide to be used for purposes of resistance,—that is, we presume, by battles in the Courts, or by organised defiance to threats of eviction. As the farmers can adopt the latter plan without parting with their much-loved coin, as the former will benefit no one but attorneys, who must be pretty prosperous already in the midst of the legal war, and as neither will diminish the landlord's rights one jot, the peasantry are not likely to follow the advice ; but the motive with which it is offered is obvious, and suggests a hope. Mr. Dillon, who understands Ireland quite as well as Mr. Parnell does, and has much more instinctive sympathy with her people, dreads a land settlement which shall in any way be final. We question if he would let the peasantry take the land as a gift, if he saw the smallest chance of deterring them from so doing. That dread, so deep that it overcomes every conviction which Mr. Dillon must have derived from his education, is for all just Englishmen, and especially for Unionists, a source of hope. The agrarian trouble, it is clear to Mr. Dillon, is the base of the Home- rule agitation, and it must be perfectly possible, if the peasantry assent, to settle the agrarian trouble. The statesmen and financiers who have touched the question have not succeeded yet, because they have never fully recognised that it is the tenure itself, and not merely its accompanying incidents, which Irish- men detest ; but there is nothing in the problem which should extinguish hope. We have to obtain £4,500,000 a year, half the existing rent, out of the land, or other resources indicated and granted by Irishmen ; that amount once fully secured, the problem is solved, for that is Consol interest on the price of the land of Ireland. We do not believe that, with a quit-rent of, say, 3s. an acre, a special tax on land transfer after the French model, and a direct, though moderate, grant from the United Kingdom, the problem would seem to a strong Finance Minister even a difficult one. At all events, it is far less difficult than Home-rule, and the whole action of the National leaders, and especially Mr. Dillon's, proves that the alternative lies there,—that is to say, in a Land Bill which shall make eviction impossible or unnecessary. If that is true, and we cannot imagine it false, the shore is in sight, even in the sea of Irish troubles.
The second gleam is the extraordinary sermon delivered by Dr. Nulty, Catholic Bishop of Meath, on Sunday last. Dr. Nulty is a fervent Nationalist ; he detests English rule, English law-courts, and English landlords with all his heart ; but he grasps the situation clearly, and he not only utterly condemns murder, outrage, and moonlighting as crimes fatal to the soul, and abhorrent to the Church, but in the plainest and haughtiest language, he tells those guilty of them that he will himself hunt them down and deliver them up to justice. They shall be hanged here, as well as damned hereafter. One rubs one's eyes, as one reads sentences so different from any recently delivered by an Irish Catholic prelate; but there is no doubt whatever of the authenticity of the report. No man in Ireland would have ventured to put such sentences into the Bishop's mouth, and nobody could have invented his argument, that one reason for not committing outrage was that the inno- cent were so often punished for it by the Courts. He was as • savage and as unreasonable as Mr. Sexton about some recent ver-
dicts, especially that in the Barbav illa case, but he told his hearers not only that murder was a crime "always detested of men, and certain to be punished by God," but that all moonlighters, were murderers. "I say," continued Dr. Nulty, " that those men who visit their neighbours' houses in armed parties, who go there for the purpose of taking out arms, of stealing these arms, I say that these are murderers beyond all controversy or doubt. According to the teaching of our Lord, they are all guilty of the crime of murder. What do they want these firearms for? Of what use are these firearms except to shoot ;, and what do they want to shoot with them I They do not want to shoot pheasants, or snipe, or partridges. They dare not do so. They want to shoot human beings—living men like myself. They want to imbrue their hands in their brothers' blood. That is the only object they can have in view ; and there- fore a man who goes into a house like that, and takes out arms with deliberate and wilful intent, is guilty of murder. But, it will be said, they will not murder their fellow-creatures. What else do they want the arms for They will murder their fellow- creatures. They only require to get drink. As soon as they become infuriated with drink, that moment the sanguinary instincts in us all get such control over them that they must surely commit murder. They have only to be asked to take• the life of an obnoxious person ; they have only to get money.- or something like that, or to have some hatred against some person—an unjust hatred, like Cain's—to incite them to . murder." There is no flinching from the truth in that state- ment, which could not have been made more boldly had it been . uttered by Dr. Temple in St. Paul's ; but the Bishop df Meath drove it home by a still plainer utterance. It is one thing to assure a man that he is a criminal who will be punished in a future state, and quite another to tell him that he deserves punishment in this world, and shall most assuredly receive it : " There are men in this parish capable of doing anything. I know them well. I know the man that burned poor Murphy's house at Irishtown. I know the perpetrators of the outrages that have been committed in this parish for years past. They are a little more than half-a-dozen. I tell them they are under police vigilance. They may elude a policeman when he appears because his uniform warns them. But we will have detectives not in uniform. We will have them watching those men, and if we can trace the perpetrators of these outrages, we will do everything in our power to bring them to justice, and inflict on them the last punishment the law can allow. This is not the time to be trifling with them." Words could hardly be more directly to the point, or, we may add, more creditable to a Bishop who believes, as every Christian. should believe, that among the sins too often overlooked, is that of " bearing the sword of the Lord in vain." It is quite true that Dr. Nulty dwelt with laboured reiteration- upon the harm which outrage was doing to the popular cause, upon the votes which it would cost the Parnellites in England, and upon the weapon which it placed in the landlords' hands to wield in their warfare with the tenantry;. but those references, however unworthy as arguments for they Sixth Commandment, when rightly considered, increase the
hopefulness of the sermon. The sermon is not the utterance of a Bishop inspired by piety alone, and denouncing crime from hate of crime, even though it serves the purposes of his party. It may be that—we do not doubt it—but it is also the speech of an ecclesiastic who sees clearly that crime does not serve his cause, and insists that it is as contrary Nationalist policy as it is both to human instinct and to Divine law. That a Catholic prelate in Ireland should see this, and should say it publicly in the uncompromising style adopted by Dr. Nulty, is at least a sign that the Extremists - have not quite mastered the Catholic Church, which, if not mastered, must be the deadly foe of violent crime, and that here and there, at all events, the " sanction," without which the National League is powerless, is regarded, as it; deserves to be, as a defiance of the first law alflie of God and of every social system. It is not, we fear, much to say, but it is unhappily too true, that when Catholic Bishops denounce Nationalist crime—denounce it with a will, and not per- functorily—there is some hope for unhappy Ireland. Every voice so raised from such a plaza releases a thousand voices hushed by cowardice, and helps to restore that civil courage the decay of which has been the mainstay of the National League.
We shall be told that Dr. Nulty is only strengthening the hands of the Nationalists, who desire to abstain from crime this winter, lest the British democracy should be shocked ; but we must decline to accept that argument.
We are not curious to inquire from what mixed motives men repent of criminality, if only they finally abandon it, and had much rather Ireland were innocent and separate, than guilty as she is now, and a British province ; but we do not believe in the argument even as a cynical one. We believe that the settlement of the agrarian question is essential to any arrangement with Ireland which will last a generation, to the Unionist arrangement as much as to Mr. Parnell's, and the grand obstacle to that settlement is the prevalence of agrarian crime. The English people are not shocked at the Irish for desiring a revolution in their tenure. They wonder why they want it so much, and they doubt their wisdom in wanting it ; but they are no more shocked than they would be if Ireland revolted in order to supersede the doctrine of caveat eznptor by the dogma of implied warranty. What shocks them is crime, the murder of a landlord for claiming his full rent, the shooting of a farmer for hiring a farm on which an eviction has taken place, the boycotting of a tenant because lie has paid the rent which he agreed to pay. They hold it unworthy to yield to such practices, and will not, as they say, put a premium on murder by turning the murderers into freeholders. The example would be too demoralising to the remainder of the Empire. Let outrage oease, and they will be ready enough to consider the agrarian question, and even to make the sacrifices without which that question will never be terminated for good. Why should they refuse Irish social requests, if those requests are not contrary to the moral law, and are supported by the steady voting of eighty-six Parliamentary representatives ? If Ireland were clean of outrage, the tenure could be settled like any other social question; and it is on this, we repeat once more, that the fate of Home-rule hangs.
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